• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

This Catfish Walks So Weirdly, Scientists Named A New Kind Of Locomotion

January 17, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Some fish can walk, but the armored catfish goes one step further in wriggling its way across desert environments in search of resources. Wriggling is the wrong word, however, as scientists considered the mode of locomotion to be so unusual as deserving of its own word: reffling.

The armored catfish reffles its way across land when it finds itself at a dead end in its present habitat. It may be that the isolated body of water it was living in has run out of food or some other resource, and so rather than giving in to its fate, it ups sticks and reffles off someplace else.

Advertisement

These fish are loricariid catfishes, a highly diverse group of fishes that can be found in Central and South America. They have a highly specialized morphology that enables them to inhabit aquatic and terrestrial environments without dying – but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

In National Geographic’s Welcome To Earth, we saw an armored catfish making the perilous journey. It leaves a unique track in the sand as it reffles its way towards water. The clip states they can survive for hours at a time on land, but if time runs out, it can be fatal.

Fortunately, the nomadic catfish they caught on camera completes its mission, reffling across the sand and splashing back into more comfortable aquatic surroundings. They’re able to navigate thanks to tastebuds that line their bodies and can detect compounds that indicate water’s proximity and quality.

Advertisement

The term “reffling” was coined by a 2021 study that sought to better understand the terrestrial behaviors of armored catfish, which were previously poorly described.

“Loricariid catfishes use a novel, highly asymmetric form of axial appendage-based terrestrial locomotion involving their mouth, pectoral fins, pelvic fins, posterior axial body, and tail,” wrote the authors. “As this behavior is so unlike any other described locomotor behavior, we have created a new word to describe it: reffling.” 

The unique approach to moving across land may be the consequence of them being rather stiff for a fish, but their rigidity has its perks, too.

Advertisement

“These species have numerous unique morphological traits that may greatly reduce body and fin flexibility,” they continued. “Because loricariids are so inflexible, they may be constrained into reffling as their only means of terrestrial locomotion, but their stiffness may improve force transmission, allowing them to be among the fastest fishes on land.”

Those fins weren’t made for walking, and that’s not what armored catfish do.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Soccer – FIFA backs down on threat to fine Premier clubs who play South American players
  2. U.S. House passes abortion rights bill, outlook poor in Senate
  3. Two children killed in missile strikes on Yemen’s Marib – state news agency
  4. We’ve Breached Six Of The Nine “Planetary Boundaries” For Sustaining Human Civilization

Source Link: This Catfish Walks So Weirdly, Scientists Named A New Kind Of Locomotion

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • “Dead Men’s Fingers” Might Just Be The Strangest Fruit On The Planet
  • The South Atlantic’s Giant Weak Spot In The Earth’s Magnetic Field Is Growing
  • Nearly Half A Century After Being Lost, “Zombie Satellite” LES-1 Began Sending Signals To Earth
  • Extinct In the Wild, An Incredibly Rare Spix’s Macaw Chick Hatches In New Hope For Species
  • HUNTR/X Or Giant Squid? Following Alien Claims, We Asked Scientists What They Would Like Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS To Be
  • Flat-Earthers Proved Wrong Using A Security Camera And A Garage
  • Earth Breaches Its First Climate Tipping Point: We’re Moving Into A World Without Coral Reefs
  • Cheese Caves, A Proposal, And Chance: How Scientists Ended Up Watching Fungi Evolve In Real Time
  • Lab-Grown 3D Embryo Models Make Their Own Blood In Regenerative Medicine Breakthrough
  • Humans’ Hidden “Sixth Sense” To Be Mapped Following $14.2 Million Prize – What Is Interoception?
  • Purple Earth Hypothesis: Our Planet Was Not Blue And Green Over 2.4 Billion Years Ago
  • Hippos Hung Around In Europe 80,000 Years Later Than We Thought
  • Officially Gone: Slender-Billed Curlew, Once-Widespread Migratory Bird, Declared Extinct By IUCN
  • Watch: Rare Footage Captures Freaky Faceless Cusk Eels Lurking On The Deep-Sea Floor
  • Watch This Funky Sea Pig Dancing Its Way Through The Deep Sea, Over 2,300 Meters Below The Surface
  • NASA Lets YouTuber Steve Mould Test His “Weird Chain Theory” In Space
  • The Oldest Stalagmite Ever Dated Was Found In Oklahoma Rocks, Dating Back 289 Million Years
  • 2024’s Great American Eclipse Made Some Birds Behave In Surprising Ways, But Not All Were Fooled
  • “Carter Catastrophe”: The Math Equation That Predicts The End Of Humanity
  • Why Is There No Nobel Prize For Mathematics?
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version